This paper makes the case for studying concreteness in language as a bridge that will allow language technology to support the understanding and improvement of ethnic inclusivity in job advertisements. We propose an annotation scheme that guides the assignment of sentences in job ads to classes that reflect concrete actions, i.e., what the employer needs people to do, and abstract dispositions, i.e., who the employer expects people to be. Using an annotated dataset of Dutch-language job ads, we demonstrate that machine learning technology is effectively able to distinguish these classes.

Deep learning holds great promise for detecting discriminatory language in the public sphere. However, for the detection of illegal age discrimination in job advertisements, regex approaches are still strong performers. In this paper, we investigate job advertisements in the Netherlands. We present a qualitative analysis of the benefits of the ‘old’ approach based on regexes and investigate how neural embeddings could address its limitations.